A business information enterprise system may improve an organization's ability to monitor and/or manage data in a complex business environment. For example, such a system might store a large amount of business information, including a yearly global sales plan and profit data on both a company-wide and regional basis. Different users may then access the information in different ways. For example, a business analyst might be interested in a normalized comparison of each year's sales plan figures as compared to other years. A human resources administrator might instead want to access a list of employee names located in a particular country. In general, many different types of data could be stored by, and accessed from, a business information enterprise system (e.g., inventory data, sales data, and/or accounting data) and different types of data can often be used in different ways.
In some cases, business information is accessed through a Web-based “portal” that can display information to, and interact with, users. For example, a user might view business reports and/or select a particular item within a report to obtain further information about that item. Note that a user (or group of users) might want to customize the way in which information is displayed and/or interacted with via the portal and/or an associated enterprise portal server.
Note that some users may want to view and/or interact with information in addition to the information available directly from an enterprise portal server. For example, a user might want to access an integrated display that includes both enterprise portal information and supplemental information, such as information associated with a browser-based collaboration platform and/or a browser-based document-management platform.
FIG. 1 is a block diagram of a system 100 wherein a client apparatus 110 may display such integrated content to a user. In this case, the client 110 may transmit at (A) a request for content to a remote enterprise portal server 120. The enterprise portal server 120 may then at (B) transmit a request for supplemental content to a remote supplemental server 130. For example, a user may have selected a display that included both enterprise portal information and supplemental information (e.g., information associated with a browser-based collaboration platform and/or a browser-based document-management platform). In this case, the enterprise portal server 120 might determine that a portion of the information was not available from local enterprise resources (e.g., that the supplemental content is not available). As a result, the enterprise portal server 120 might request the additional information from the remote supplemental server 130.
In response to the request from the enterprise portal server 120, at (C) the supplemental server 130 provides the requested supplemental content to the enterprise portal server 120. These types of requests and/or responses might be associated with, for example, the Web Services for Remote Portals (WSRP) and/or Web Services for Interactive Applications (WSIA) protocols.
The enterprise portal server 120 may then combine that information with the data available from other sources (e.g., an enterprise database), and transmit the integrated content to the client 110 at (D) for display to the user.
Note, however, that such an approach may have a number of disadvantages. For example, the enterprise portal server 120 may need to locally store and manage user mappings 122 (or similar mechanism) to enable subsequent connections to the supplemental server. The user mappings 122 may, for example, include information about a number of different users and/or a number of different supplemental servers 130 (e.g., indicating which users access which supplemental servers 130 along with various default connection parameters and settings). Moreover, the user mappings 122 may need to include security information, including user names and associated passwords that are needed to access supplemental server accounts as appropriate. Storing and managing such user mappings 122 may be a time consuming and error-prone task, especially when there are a relatively large number of potential users and/or supplemental servers 130.
Approaches that may improve the integration of supplemental content into an enterprise portal display could, therefore, be desirable. Moreover, it may advantageous to provide one or more systems and/or methods to do so in an efficient and convenient manner.